


gallows humor

by arbitrarily



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Injury Recovery, Mild Painplay, Post-Fallout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-17 19:35:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15468510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: They have matching ligature marks around their necks, a joke unto itself.





	gallows humor

**Author's Note:**

> Big time spoilers for _Fallout_. Like most things I write, I'm not sure how this happened. I am, however, really, really sure I am very, very into these two right now.

 

It snows that night in Kashmir. Ilsa’s back is killing her. 

The pain is nothing new. 

Her joints are sore and stiff most mornings. There’s the old shoulder injury — dislocated after a multistory fall in Kuala Lumpur seven years ago. She had bounced back from that easily enough but each passing year she feels that fall more and more acutely. There’s the phantom pain from a grievous stab wound she suffered outside a prison camp near the Chechen border. She bled out into the snow, left delirious from blood loss and pain alike, and she had thought it pretty, a painting created just for her, in name and body. Like those paintings of saints they sell in the markets of Mexico City and Monterrey, two cities she sweated her way through on her first mission, zipping through on motorbike, buzzed on little more than adrenaline and mezcal and the total consuming fear that she would fuck this up. She bought a prayer card with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe; she left it in a motel room at the border, concussed when she smacked her head on the porcelain lip of the sink mid-fight. 

Now she’ll stretch when she wakes each morning. Bend right into a pilates routine so familiar to her she can do it with or without sleep, hungover or clear-eyed, whole or injured. Watchful and afraid. They get it wrong about her. They all do. She knows fear. She knows it as intimately as it knows her, better than any other. She was steeped in it, raised in it. She doesn’t know what she would do without its familiar raw meat taste filling her mouth. 

The body, she knows, decides when it has had enough. It also knows when it needs something more.

She shifts again on the mattress. It does her no favors. She shifts back.

The team had made the unanimous, unvoiced decision that they would stay behind rather than travel back to Washington with Sloane. The team — Ilsa’s name, now cleared by MI6, included among them. The team. It fits like a suit too big for her, something she will have to grow into if she can. 

Ethan is still in the med tent with the skeleton crew that remained. Ilsa had decamped to the houses at the edge of the camp with Luther and Benji. Their shared relief had simmered into something quieter, more frightened. Something you kept and carried to yourself, so they all had. Luther took the bed in the topmost room of the house leaving Ilsa and Benji to share the single large room that comprised the main floor, two mattresses strewn in two opposing corners.

Ilsa rolls over again. She gets to her feet. 

 

 

 

Benji has his arm curled behind his head, sprawled comfortably save for the obvious tension thrumming through him. 

“You come to finish me off?”

Ilsa stands over him. She crosses her arms over chest. “Excuse me?”

“Is the third time you try to kill me finally going to be the charm?” He keeps his voice low even though Luther is one floor away and most likely asleep. 

“If I wanted you dead, Benji, I would have left you to hang.” 

His laugh is breathless and incredulous, quiet. “With friends like these,” he trails off. The word is a poor fit, like a pebble in a shoe. Uncomfortable, doesn’t belong. She doesn't belong. _Friend_ , for fuck’s sake. 

Ilsa settles down beside Benji, his eyebrows raised to meet his hairline. He scrambles to sit up, grant her a wider berth. He grimaces as he moves, an arm wrapped around his middle.

Neither says anything until the quiet between them is too awkward to ignore. He isn't touching her and she’s not touching him, but she can feel the heat from his body, as if she is leeching it into her own.

“Did you know,” Benji finally says, soft and barely audible, “that it’s said, at his public execution, William Palmer, notorious murderer, the Prince of Poisoners, was brought up the scaffold. He looked at the trapdoor beneath the noose and he asked the hangman, ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’”

“That’s funny,” she says. She doesn’t laugh. “I thought poison was a woman’s weapon.”

“No one told William Palmer that.” He jerks his head towards her. “Have you ever used poison?”

She lifts her eyes to him, mock innocence. “Not yet.”

He snorts. His eyes are fixed on her face until they’re not. “It’s dumb, isn’t it?” he says. “He had me hanging by the neck and all I could think was that phrase in my head. ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Just, over and over again. ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’”

“Benji.”

“Are you sure it’s safe,” he mutters. He turns his head back towards her. He looks jittery. Like he’s still mid-mission rather than post. Adrenaline still running hot and reckless.

“What?” she says.

“I guess.” He shakes his head, starts again. “A suicide mission without the actual suicide is just,” he pauses, “existential foreplay.”

“You were prepared to die?” Her inflection is the same she would use for an interrogation: deceptively gentle, question and statement merged so cleanly you could almost forget an answer is being demanded of you. She’s not trying to interrogate Benji. These things just come naturally to her now. 

“Christ. No.” He laughs. “It’s, well. You work yourself up for something terrible to happen to you and then something mildly less terrible happens but now you’re still alive and now you have to, to, process it and keep living but with the knowledge that this less-than-death but still-pretty-fucking-awful thing happened to you.”

Her gaze drifts down to his throat, mottled and sore-looking.

“I wasn’t going to let him kill you.”

“Yes. Right. You’ll forgive a man for his uncertainty.”

The house Lane held her in, the house with the bomb, looked just like the house they are in now. She had tried to scream, despite the gag in her mouth, her throat raw with the effort, each movement made choking off her breath. She couldn’t stop him. She couldn’t stop either of them. Benji stepped into the room and she couldn’t stop that, and Lane was on him and she couldn’t stop that either. She had to stop him. She arched her back and she slammed herself down, the edge of the table, the chair shattering, the pain immense and dizzying. She could stop him, she was going to stop him. She whipped the rope and then she was on him, too.

“I wasn’t going to let him kill you,” she repeats, quieter this time. The room is dark, but she can see his face clearly. The moon reflects off the fallen snow, picturesque but for the smallpox and the nuclear bombs and them. She can’t read his expression, studious and cool. The side of his arm brushes and then settles against her. She doesn’t move. 

“As … alarming as your presence is here, what is it you think you’re doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says, careful, as if working her way through a minefield. “I thought maybe you’d still be up, too.”

“And you were right.” He looks like he is on the tip of saying something more but thinks the better of it. “Existential foreplay,” he says again instead. 

“Foreplay,” she repeats. The fingers of her right hand brush against his left, the scant space of mattress between them. He tenses. His eyes are fixed on her mouth now. Hers drift back down to his neck. 

There’s only silence as she brings her body closer to his. He’s rigid, barely breathing, his mouth parting open, expectant without even realizing it. 

Up close she can see his throat bruised worse than hers. Ilsa reaches, her chest warm against his side, and she presses a finger against the line circling his throat. He hisses, but he does not recoil from her. “Does that hurt?” she asks quietly.

“Of course it bloody hurts.”

She drags her fingers lightly along that line, not even black and blue but bruised green and purple, and his hand drops to grip at her thigh. Something flutters within her. She brings her body closer, her face closer to his neck. “He made a mess of you,” she murmurs.

“Ilsa.” His pulse leaps under her hand, her name dragged rough for both syllables to match two beats. She lifts her hand and briefly cradles his jaw. She drops her hand just as quick. As abrupt. She places it on top of the hand he has on her thigh. 

Her grip is loose around his wrist and she raises his hand slowly, her eyes fixed on his face the entire time. Benji doesn’t know where to look, his eyes wide, darting from his hand in hers to her face to her throat.

She lets go. He reaches then. He’s smart. She’s sure it says as much in his file: intelligent, a team player. Catches on quickly. His hand circles her own throat easily enough and he presses down, carefully, hesitantly, as if experimenting. His capacity for violence still surprises him. She wonders what sort of man he’ll be when it no longer does. She wonders if he has ever fit a hand around another’s throat before. She assumes no: his grip is too slack, too much obvious worry writ across his face and in his hands that the slightest bit of pressure would be too much for her to survive. 

She nods, the gesture small, but he sees it. Something shifts over his face; his eyes gleam that much brighter in the dark. He squeezes, still gentle, so gentle, and he runs his thumb beneath the cut of her jaw. He squeezes again, harder this time, and she arches her neck into his hand. 

It does hurt. He wasn’t wrong. But after each miserable fight Ilsa has ever fought and then recovered from, she likes to poke at her wounds. It’s a way to rebuild herself. Catalog the hurt. Try to memorize the pain. Try to avoid it next time. Let it fuel the next time. The rope pulling at her neck, her vision spotting, the sound of Benji’s footsteps as he approached, only to be cut off, brought down low. 

Her breath hitches noisily and Benji releases his hand. “Sorry,” he mutters. 

“No,” she says, as breathless as if he had kissed her instead. 

Ilsa lifts her own hand to her throat and she lays back, waiting. Willing.

 

 

 

“I didn’t come to you for this,” she says. Their bodies are clumsy and hurried, desperate against each other. Not kissing and not fucking — _not yet_ , she thinks — but still clothed, rutting against each other, finding different ways to make each other ache. 

“Is that supposed to make me feel nice?” And _there_ , a bite of cruelty in his voice, low and mostly hidden. She has been told, on more than one occasion, that she brings out the worst in a man. There are worse talents to possess.

“No,” she says, clipped and short. Her jaw aches steadily now. Her back’s gone stiff. Her patience is limited when it comes to the things she wants off-the-clock. She can stake out a mark for hours, days, on end, her body still and unmoving, everything in her slowed to fill the stretch of time she will be made to wait. But when she wants to be fucked, she wants it now. No time for foreplay, existential or otherwise. She wants to feel the pressure of him between her legs. She wants something, someone, to break herself against. She finds she specifically wants it to be him.

She smears her mouth up to his ear, lips and tongue passing over a raw-edged scrape. She feels his hand spasm and clutch at her hip. His fingers, without knowing, find a bruise beneath and press. Her entire body jolts against his. “I simply thought I’d extend you the courtesy,” but the word, the thought, bleeds out into a stifled groan when he presses that bruise again, learning her, or if not her, then her body, how to make it bend and maybe even obey.

“The courtesy?” And, god, he sounds wrecked already. If she spreads her legs that much wider, if she shifts her hips down, she’ll be able to feel the hard edge of his cock against her, even through the layers of their clothes. She does just that, and his roll up and into her. He all but whimpers.

She catches his earlobe between her teeth. He sucks in a breath. It’s quiet, here in the river valley. Quiet now with the government choppers gone and the bulk of the medical camp evacuated. All she hears is Benji, his breathing heavy and harsh, the wet of his mouth she has yet to explore, the rasp of their clothes against each other and the stiff sheets on his bare mattress. Her own heart thudding over-quick and demanding. “I’m not using you,” she says, and then she bites down. 

A laugh sputters from him. “Oh god, I wish you would.”

She wants to tell him he has no idea what that would mean. What it is to ask someone to use you. How she uses people. How she already has used him. People aren’t supposed to want to be used by each other. She wants to ask him if he knows the cost of that, how much it could hurt, but then, maybe he already knows. Each time her hands find his chest, his ribs, he winces away before pressing himself that much more bodily into her. Her hands. So she doesn’t say anything. She drags his pants past his hips and he clutches his side as he kicks them off. 

She hears the soft whisper of, “Jesus,” beneath her jaw when he gets a hand between her own legs.Her pants are bunched awkwardly around her knees, the air cold when it finds her bared skin. He finds her wet, his accent making the word wet and quavering, too. It’s clear Benji’s the kind of man who thinks you have to prepare a woman for a cock, the tips of his fingers slipping into her, rubbing gently. Ilsa is too impatient for that. 

He grabs her wrist when she goes to reach for his cock, leaking already against her hip. His fingers press into the rope burns left from Lane and her whole body twitches. It hurts; it feels good.

“Don’t,” he says, but he says it the same way she thinks he’d beg the word _please_. She thinks she wants him to beg, thinks that would be Benji as she likes him best: on his knees, pleading. 

Her breathing is rough and she quirks an eyebrow up. His breath is hot as it feathers against her cheek. “You do that,” he grunts, “this’ll be over before it starts.”

Ilsa pushes against him, pulls her hand from his grip. Gets a fist full of his hair and tugs, likes the way he can’t help but moan.

“Then, just, fuck me,” she grits out. A wild, out of his element look crests over Benji’s face. She’s seen that face before, the context always life or death, life or near-death, comical here, a place she can finally and fully appreciate it. It passes quickly, replaced by tight concentration and more than a little pain as he gets her body arranged under his, his over hers, and then he’s inside her.

A gasp pulls from her that sounds like a start of a laugh. The angle’s all wrong, the stretch too immediate. Her back aches miserably and her pulse swallows her throat as the rope burns and bruises throb. This is exactly what she needs. She tips her head back and hisses when Benji starts to move, unsteady but forceful. His cock’s fatter than she thought he’d be; she’ll feel this in the morning, too. 

Benji’s noisy above her, inside her, but he’s trying to stay quiet, each sound aborted and cut-off, all the more needful because of it. It's hot in a way she never would have thought to assign him. He makes the same noises she’s sure he would use if she really was trying to kill him. 

He comes in a quick rush. Then it’s the weight of his body, heavy; he’d hate to know that this too is a surprise to her. He’d hate to think that maybe she once thought of him as insubstantial. His weight on her is good, though, pressing her into the thin mattress, the ground cold under them. 

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he keeps panting, the word losing meaning each time he says it. His cock softens wet inside of her before it slips out. He makes to move from her, but she stops him. She holds him down on top of her, immobile, a hand flat between his shoulder blades that makes him shudder against her before he stills. 

“Don’t move,” and her voice doesn’t sound like hers — pained and desperate. Her hips shift, indeterminate in a way she rarely is, seeking friction, something. Anything. 

Benji moves anyway. His bare thigh slots between her legs, and fuck, that’s good. Good, but empty; she’ll take it. She smears her cunt over his thigh and grinds down, clenches tight at the caught noise in the back of his throat that she thinks — she knows — would’ve been pathetic had he let it leave his mouth. 

Her thigh muscles squeeze around him, make him hitch and drag his body against hers. Her entire body aches like a fresh bruise — her blood too close to the surface, responsive and unexplored. She wants him to press down harder. 

“Benji,” she says, and she’s close. He kisses her. Like everything they have done to each other, it’s sudden and sharp. She moans into his mouth, spit-slick, when he grips her jaw too tight, bright pinpricks of light sparking at the pain. His mouth drags off of hers, their bodies jostling too rough. He kisses wet and open the sorest point of her jaw and her hips buck. His thigh presses hot and tight to her, his mouth and his jaw scrape against her battered face. His forearm comes down hard against her bruised throat. 

Ilsa slaps a hand over her mouth as she comes, unable to catch the first loud hiccup of sound that breaks from her. Benji’s mouth closes over the marks on her throat. 

Ilsa squeezes her eyes shut; every part of her hurts, each breath stuttering painfully out of her. She can feel Benji start to pull away from her, cold air entering the space opened between them.

In a room much like this one, the clock had counted down to nothing, and then. The drop of the plutonium, the thud vibrating beneath their feet. She had never held plutonium in her hands before. It was heavy. As she held it, Benji’s hand fastened on her wrist. She looked up at him in alarm, warning, unsure what he was doing. Another double cross, that had been her first thought. When you played this game for as long as she had, you expect it of everybody. But, no. Instead, what she found was a near delirious relief. As if he expected to share that with her. 

Her gaze shifted to Lane then, bound and prone on the floor. She liked the look of futility on him. He wore it like it hurt.

“Don’t move,” she says to Benji again. She opens her eyes. The slice of Benji’s mouth, the tired eyes. His throat. It’s in her head now, too. She wants to tell him that. Are you sure it’s safe. Are you sure it’s safe. “Don’t,” she says, and then she stops.

Once, before, Lane’s fingers had brushed her hair back behind her ear. His breath was at her throat. “There’s no one you can trust,” he said to her. “You know this. And yet.”

She waited to see what he would do to her next. “And yet,” she echoed.

“Yeah,” Benji says. Are you sure. It’s safe. “Alright.” His body is warm as it settles against hers.

 

 

 


End file.
